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发表于 2009-9-20 18:02:12
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A private breakfast of specially prepared fruit-juice drinks and granola was taken up to his bedroom every morning by Conrad Murray, the only person allowed in. For lunch, Jackson would eat with the children from a menu that often included spinach salad and chicken. Murray would sometimes join them for a dinner of seared tuna.
Chase, the family chef, said the doctor often conferred with her about Jackson’s diet. Jackson told her: “You have to take care of me. I’m a dancer.” She recalls: “He wanted food that would not make him cramp up while he was dancing.”
When Chase suggested the family might enjoy “comfort-food Saturdays” with barbecued chicken, frankfurters and Mexican tacos for a change, Jackson initially welcomed but later rejected the idea. As the concerts approached, and the family, Chase included, prepared to fly to London, “healthy eating became his obsession”.
When their father died, Prince, Paris and Blanket — perhaps for the first time in their complicated lives — discovered what it meant to be junior members of the fractious, extended Jackson clan. Soon after Michael’s death, his sister La Toya Jackson descended upon their home, frantically trawling his possessions for clues to his death. Days later, their grandmother Katherine, wrongly believing her son to have died intestate, went to court to fight for control of his estate and custody of his three children.
At the memorial service, a long-lost 25-year-old brother, Omer — the reputed product of a one-night stand Jackson had with Pia Bhatti, a Norwegian fan, in 1984 — appeared to have been belatedly welcomed into the family: Omer was seated in the front row with the uncles and aunts.
The children currently live with Katherine, the Jackson matriarch, at the family compound on Hayvenhurst Avenue in Encino, a predominantly white, middle-class town popular with Hollywood stars, two hours north of Los Angeles. Former residents include John Wayne and David Hasselhoff. It was here that Michael Jackson spent most of his young life, and where, in turn, his own children are set to spend much of theirs.
The eight-bedroom, 11,000 sq ft mock-Tudor mansion is surrounded by outhouses, water features and 12ft-high walls to ensure maximum privacy. The main entrance to the house is set at 90 degrees to the road to fend off prying eyes. There is still $4m (£2.4m) owing on the mortgage after Jackson bought the house from his father, Joe, in 1981, and $16,000 in property tax arrears.
Many of the features Jackson later incorporated into his fabled ranch at Neverland made their debut here, notably a collection of exotic animals, including Bubbles, the chimpanzee. The children will be reminded of their father every time they step out of the front door and onto a replica of his star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which is set into a garden path. Uncle Tito Jackson, who has visited them, says: “The kids are very, very normal. They have lots of fun, they squirt the dogs with water guns and they play with toys and play ball with their cousins.”
Of the three, Paris appears to have adjusted best so far to life without her father. Family sources report that she loves Hayvenhurst. She is especially fond of what she calls the “candy store”, a room next to the movie theatre where parts of the Thriller video were shot. “Paris does a lot of reading and watercolour painting and hair-braiding with her cousins, who visit every day, and she speaks regularly to a handful of friends on her mobile phone,” a family member told us. She has already expressed a desire to give up home tutoring to attend a private school, Campbell Hall, in North Hollywood, where her idol, the actress Dakota Fanning, is a student.
Blanket is having a harder time. “He cries himself to sleep and keeps asking where his daddy is,” according to a close family source. “His Aunt Rebbie spent the first few nights sleeping on a cot bed beside him because he was scared to sleep alone.” For now, Blanket has been given a full-time nanny to comfort him at night, and “acts pretty wild” during the day.
Meanwhile, the older boy, Prince, has withdrawn into a private world, playing video games on his hand-held PSP for hours on end. He is not allowed to loiter on the internet. The children’s grandmother, now guardian, Katherine, disapproves of online chat rooms. “She makes sure that internet access is monitored and time-limited around the house,” the source says.
The job of parenting them will inevitably be complicated. At 79, Katherine is too frail with arthritis and reportedly too forgetful to manage on her own, so she has engaged her eldest child, Rebbie, 59, to oversee most of the day-to-day care. Both Katherine and Rebbie are devout Jehovah’s Witnesses. They attend services four times a week and it is likely that religion will play an increasing part in the lives of the children.
Family sources say that Katherine has already made it clear that they will be raised within the faith, and that, when they are old enough, they will be expected to knock on doors on Sunday mornings with copies of Watchtower magazine.
Rebbie has the advantage of being the least recognisable of the Jackson clan. It is telling that when pictures were published of Paris in Las Vegas alongside her aunt, Rebbie’s name did not appear on any of the captions. Her other great asset is a steely stability: not a trait the Jacksons are known for.
Married for nearly 41 years to Nate, her childhood sweetheart, Rebbie is the only Jackson sibling to have survived a pop career unscathed. Briefly famous in the 1980s for her one hit, Centipede, Rebbie has devoted most of her life to bringing up her three children. “Rebbie got away from the Jacksons before Joe started beating them all into stars. She says she was lucky,” says a close family member.
Until recently, Rebbie was a comparative stranger to Michael Jackson’s children, though they did at least see more of her than they did of Debbie Rowe — the birth mother of Prince and Paris — who was shut out of the children’s life by Jackson, but who was finally granted access rights by a court in Los Angeles in July.
According to her former personal assistant, Rowe was discouraged from seeing the children after Blanket was born, on the grounds that such visits would be disruptive. “Debbie got very upset about being called a cold, neglectful mother, but she genuinely believed that Michael loved his kids, although not always wisely. It hurt, but she cut herself off. Now she is hoping that she will get to know her two kids.”
Whatever relationship — if any — they have with their mother, they will still have to contend with the rest of the Jackson clan. They are certain to find themselves embroiled in the money squabbles that have always been a hallmark of the Jacksons. Michael’s burial itself had to be postponed since so many siblings were attending a rival event for which they were receiving appearance fees.
Also brewing is a row over a proposed American tour involving the so-called “Jackson 8”. At issue is the unequal division of a moneypot of more than $12m, which would pay Janet $4m and Rebbie $250,000. Katherine continues to object to the marketing and merchandising ideas put forward by her children’s lawyers to exploit their dead brother’s musical legacy. In return, the brothers and sisters are none too keen on her foisting her strict religious views on her grandchildren. And nobody likes the idea put forward by Grandpa Joe that he should visit the children at Hayvenhurst from time to time — least of all Rowe, who made his absence a non-negotiable part of her access settlement.
There may be other problems: Rowe has never met Rebbie, barely knows Katherine, and is baffled and annoyed by the claim of an English osteopath, Mark Lester, who starred in the 1968 film Oliver!, to be the biological father of her daughter, Paris. “Debbie finds that ridiculous.”
It did not take long for the next rumour to surface: that Macaulay Culkin, the child star of Home Alone, is the father of Blanket by an unknown mother. There are likely to be many more of these claims and stories of “long-lost” offspring and lovers — at least until Jackson’s shambolic finances are sorted out.
But children are famously adaptable, and in their short lives so far the Jackson Three have adapted more than most. Life for them now looks almost straightforward. It did anyway on the recent break in Las Vegas: Paris was photographed shopping for cosmetics in a local mall, looking plain and wearing glasses — something Jackson would never allow, according to a family friend. And the Jackson children were barely noticed splashing around in the hotel pool for two hours, with Blanket in his water wings, Prince sitting in the shadow of an umbrella playing with his PSP, and oh-so-grown-up Paris drinking a virgin strawberry-banana daiquiri.
The utter impossibility of that carefree scene with Michael Jackson in attendance suggests that the future for Prince, Paris and Blanket might contain the promise of a life more ordinary.
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发表于 2009-9-20 17:55:41
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发表于 2009-9-20 18:04:36
发表于 2009-9-20 18:15:41